Copilot File-Based Agents Can’t Recall Knowledge Source Files - Anyone Else Seeing Improvements?

Hi Copilot Community, 

I believe this is still a pretty well-known issue with Copilot File-Based Agents struggling with pointing to or “attaching” files in FBA’s.  I wanted to start a conversation around something we’ve been running into lately with file-based Copilot agents, and I’m curious if others are seeing similar issues — or better yet, if you’ve found any solid workarounds. 

We’re a pretty active Copilot user org with over 50 licensed users, and we’ve been building and testing a range of file-based agents. The core issue we’re facing is that agents are consistently struggling to access, attach, or reference documents that have been added to their own knowledge sources — even when everything is configured correctly. 

Here’s a quick breakdown of what we’re experiencing: 

File-based agents aren’t able to recall or point to the files in their knowledge base. It doesn’t matter if we upload PDFs, Word docs, Excel files, .txt files, or even URLs — the agent just doesn’t seem to “see” them during a prompt. 

We’ve tried uploading files both directly and through folders. Still no luck. 

When I prompt the agent, I only get options to upload “from device” or “from cloud,” but there’s no way to reference or select files that were already added to the agent’s knowledge source in Copilot Studio. 

I’ve shared these agents with other users, given them the same permissions and access I have as the agent builder — but they still can’t access or see the same files during a conversation. Super frustrating when trying to collaborate or test together. 

Some Additional Context: Newly added SharePoint Premium 

One thing that might be worth mentioning: we recently added SharePoint Premium to our Microsoft suite. It’s only rolled out to a limited number of users for now, so I’m not sure if that’s contributing to the issue — but curious if anyone has seen changes in how file-based agents behave after that upgrade. 

Also, we have some agents we built a couple of months ago that used to recall files just fine, and now those same agents aren’t able to reference the same documents anymore. We didn’t change the setup, so we’re wondering if something changed on the backend. 

What I’m Hoping to Learn 

- Is anyone else out there seeing this? 

- Are file-based agents just fundamentally broken right now when it comes to document recall? 

- Does SharePoint Premium play a role here? 

Have you found any real workarounds — not just pasting text in manually — that make these agents more usable? 

We’ve tried the obvious stuff: summarizing documents and injecting that into the system prompt, linking SharePoint folders, even playing with permissions. Nothing has fully solved it. 

Would love to hear if this is something Microsoft is already working on — or if there’s any community guidance I’m missing. 

Thanks in advance! 

— Scott R